Free A Bride For Crimson Falls by Cindy Gerard Page B

the brilliant light and shadow dance number on him.”
    “That would be her usual opening act.” Scarlett shook her head, guilt getting the best of her. “I’d better go check on him. And I ought to be whipped for leaving him in that room.”
    “Ask him if he slept with the fire extinguisher all night,” Casey suggested, her amusement tinged with sympathy.
    “If he slept at all.”
    Cutting off a caramel roll from the ones she’d just pulled out of the oven, Scarlett set it on a plate, added a couple of pats of butter and headed for his table.
    She set the plate in front of him, then pulled out a chair and sat down.
    “Good morning,” she ventured softly.
    He dragged his gaze from his cup to her face.
    The dark circles under his eyes and the haggard lines around his mouth told her there was no need to ask if he’d slept well.
    “I believe I tried to warn you,” she said without preamble, but with the sympathy she felt he deserved.
    “There’s an explanation,” he said firmly. “For everything.”
    Although he was in denial, Scarlett gave him points for not denying that something out of the ordinary had happened in Belinda’s room last night. She hadn’t experienced firsthand the sight of light blazing from the window, the heat-charged doorknob or the dancing shadows, but she’d heard accounts from more than one shaken male guest.
    “Have you had the wiring in this place checked recently?”
    “No,” she conceded, giving him that straw to cling to. If he wanted to believe what happened was the result of bad wiring, she’d give him that small gift of peace of mind.
    “The new dock was the priority. Wiring is the next item on my list of repairs. In the meantime, just in case it is the wiring, why don’t we move you out of there today? If the Annabelle doesn’t suit you, there’s another room available with a lake view. I’m sure you’d like it.”
    “I’m fine right where I am,” he insisted, and she saw in his eyes the tenacity that had gotten him to the level of success he’d attained.
    To her way of thinking, though, that didn’t let her off the hook. “Look. There’s no need for you to stay there. You don’t have to prove anything to me. Besides,” she added, fabricating an excuse for him to vacate with grace. “I’d really hoped to give that room a good once-over this month. The floors need to be resealed, the windows washed—there’s at least two weeks of work I’ve been putting off.”
    “If you’ve put it off this long, then it can wait until after I’m gone.”
    The determination in his eyes, and the insistence in his tone, accomplished two things. One, her conscience quit harping at her. Two, his reference to his imminent departure caused a twinge of regret somewhere in the vicinity of her heart.
    Of the two, the latter was the most difficult to deal with.
    It made no sense that his leaving would bother her. She wasn’t even supposed to like the man. Before his arrival, she’d been anticipating his two-week stay the way she dreaded the first of each month when the bills were due.
    Yet here she was, anticipating the sting of his goodbye like some schoolgirl in the throes of her first crush.
    He wasn’t the only one who hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep. Belinda may have been the cause of his sleeplessness, but he’d been the cause of hers. As tired as she’d been last night, she’d lain awake far too long, thinking about the fact that he’d soon be gone. Attraction, she decided, was a really rotten thing. She seemed to have no control over it, and she couldn’t act on it. Not without making a fool of herself. Not without opening herself up to hurt.
    A lose-lose situation if she’d ever seen one.
    On a sigh, she rose. It was time to get on with her day. Now that the rolls were out of the oven, she could go for her run. The party of fishermen had left at the crack of dawn for an all-day excursion. The father and his sons were already loading up their boat and